Transcript
One of the most exciting conditions inside of If So is the ability to geolocate people. Let’s take a look at the options here. So under geolocation, I can say the geolocation is and then I can select a location. We could start with something as simple as United States. And then I can have a conditional message here and say, free shipping to the United States.
There we go. Free shipping to the United States. All right, so that’s very cool. To drill down a little bit more specific.
What’s up, everybody? It’s Dave from profitable tools. And in this video, I’m going to be looking at If So, a WordPress plugin that allows you to personalize the content on your page so you can make a more ingratiating or more compelling offer to people who hit certain content on your website. Now, this is easier to see than it is to explain, so let’s jump into a demo site. Here we go.
I’ve already got if So installed. It’s living right down here in the left hand sidebar. Let’s go ahead and create a new trigger. Now, triggers and conditions are really the key to understanding the power in if So, and I’m going to do my best to explain them here. But there’s definitely too many conditions for me to get through in this video.
So head over to the if So website. If what I do show you is interesting because I think you’ll find that there’s a lot of power buried here, but I just don’t have the time or ability to go through every single feature. All right, so let’s start off with something simple so you can understand what is going on here. Let’s go ahead and choose the condition of user behavior, and we’ll do a new visitor. So the idea is, every time someone comes to the page for the very first time, I can show them unique content.
Let’s show them a nice welcome message. Something like, welcome to this site, new visitor cheesy. I know, but you get the idea. Now, of course, I could also have fallback content, which they call default content. And the idea here is that if someone’s not new, I could show them something else.
Or more importantly, if someone doesn’t meet the conditions that I’ve set, which in this case is a new visitor, then I want to display something else to them. For now, I’m going to leave that blank. You can leave it blank and just have it not show up at all. Once I publish this, I’m going to get a short code right down here. There it is.
Let’s copy that. And what we’re going to do is just load up a page and inject that shortcode so here’s my home page. Let’s go to elementor. Of course, you don’t have to use Elementor. It’s just my preferred page builder.
Now that the page has loaded, I’m going to go ahead and add a text element. Let’s put that right above the headline. And let’s go under text here and paste in that shortcode. Now you might notice there is this kind of oversized button right here that says dynamic content. If you’re an elementor user, you’ll know that that’s not normally there.
If I click on it, it actually opens up the if so page inside of the WordPress admin panel so that I could easily copy and paste. In shortpixel, it’s not the most beautiful interface, but it definitely is better than not having anything and jumping back out to the dashboard. You get the idea. All right, so now that I’ve got that shortpixel embedded, let’s style it a little bit so that we can see it properly, make it a little larger. Of course, we can use all of the elementor styling options for text.
All right, we’ll make it white in color and hit update. Now, when I go to the home page, I shouldn’t see this at all, right, because I’m logged in as administrator. In fact, let’s go ahead and do this. There we go. Nothing has changed.
Not very exciting, not a great demo. But let’s try opening this up in an incognito window where I don’t have any cookies saved. All right, there we go. Welcome to this site. New visitor displays.
Because I’m in a private window and I don’t have any cookies that show that I’m logged in or that I’ve even been to the site before. So that does bring a little bit of a problem here in that if I were to clear the cookies, then obviously this content would be displaying again or basically give me some false positives. But there are other ways, other conditions that you can use this plugin. Let me go ahead and show you back over to if so you can see I didn’t even name that trigger. Let’s go ahead and do that.
We’ll give it a name of welcome and let’s look at some of the other conditions down here. So we’ve looked at user behavior. Now these range from very, very exciting to kind of blah. I don’t care about them. In my opinion, things like device great that you can display different content to people who are on mobile from on desktop.
But you know what, every page builder has been doing that for several years now. So it’s a little bit of a moot point at this point. So let’s go ahead and check out some of the more exciting ones. Refer source I think this is super cool. Let’s say you’re doing a guest post and then you have a landing page connected from that guest post.
You’d be able to welcome people to your website that are readers of that specific blog where your article was shared. Now that’s going to ingratiate people to your brand and make them feel a lot more welcome visiting your site. It’ll actually make you feel a little bit connected to the other site. I think that’s a really cool idea. So what you do is you choose URL and then the next option is URL is, URL contains, URL is not, or URL does not contain.
So you can really granually choose which type of content gets displayed to visitors from which site. There are also some really interesting options for advertising fluent forms. If you’re advertising on Google Ads or Facebook, you can customize the content based on the actual search criteria for talking about Google Ads, what keywords did they search for, and then I can include that keyword on my website. Now that’s one of the more complicated ones to set up because I actually have to go into Google Ads and I can’t show you any client accounts right now, so I’m not going to do that in this video. But they do demonstrate it on the if so website.
So go check that out. Dynamic link conditions are very interesting. Basically we just add a string to our URL. It doesn’t actually change the page that we’re going to, but it tells if So to display particular content. So for example, if I wanted this welcome message to display, I could enter in the query string welcome.
And now if I simply add this string of characters to the end of the URL, this conditional message will display. Let’s try it out. We’ll hit update, here’s the home page without the query and let’s paste it on. And now the message displays. Even though I’m logged in, I’ve removed the restriction to not be a first time visitor.
And I can get that message to display by simply modifying the URL. A B testing is a really useful condition that is included with this plugin. And this allows us to test things like a different headline or a different button text. The thing that most people do wrong when it comes to A B testing is doing drastically different pages, one page versus the other. You really just want to change one element, then you can very clearly see if anything is making a difference.
So let’s say I wanted to have a new headline on this page. We’ll just stick with our example for now. I have it set to A B testing and I have 50% of the sessions, just randomly choosing 50% of the sessions, getting this text to display. Now what I want to do is turn on what they call reoccurrence. Now this is available on all the conditions and basically what allows you to do is each time someone visits your page, they see the same example.
So they’re not getting once they’re getting a second time, they’re getting B. We don’t want that. In fact, you can have that show up every single time for each one of the conditions. I’m going to set this to always so that the same occurrence is happening each time and then it will create another variation down here we’ll set this to A B testing as well. And this time it will be 100% of the time.
So basically 50% of the time people will be sent here. Then the rest of the time they get sent down here. Now, if I wanted to have a third group, I could change this to maybe be 33% of the people get sent to this one and then filter this down to 50% of the people see this one, and then go down to another group and they’re going to get the remainder. So we set this to 100%. I hope that’s making sense.
It’s kind of going down a filter. 33% of the people will see this. Two thirds of the people will be presented with this option and only one third of them, or 50% of them will see it. And then the remainder will go down to version C. So that’s why these numbers are maybe a little bit confusing until you understand what they’re trying to say.
Of course, if you wanted to wait one of the variants, you could certainly do that. Let’s say I want only 50% of the people to see this, and then the bottom two would be only displaying 25% each. Let’s go ahead and update this. And I’m just going to show you some of the built in analytics. So below the short code section is the analytics.
You’ll be able to see how many views and how many conversions each version is getting over in this simple little table. And I should mention that you can also limit this test. Let’s say you only wanted to run, I don’t know, for 100 sessions, 1000 sessions, whatever you decide, you can have it turn off at some point so that you can pick a final winner. And I do actually recommend doing that at some point. All right, I’m going to show you a couple more of the conditions I find most interesting.
Then I’ll show you a nifty trick with elementor. So under A B testing, we have time and date. This is exactly what it sounds like. You can basically schedule your content. So if you want to customize messages after hours or during a certain time of day, you could set that to show up here.
I think that’s okay. I don’t know if it’s quite as useful as maybe people romanticize it to be, but I’m sure there’s a use case out there. One of the most exciting conditions inside of, if so, is the ability to geolocate people. Let’s take a look at the options here. So under geolocation, I can say the geolocation is and then I can select a location.
We could start with something as simple as United States. And then I can have a conditional message here and say, free shipping to the United States. Let’s hit update here. And because I already have that short code installed, it should just show up on my home adpage. Let’s go ahead and check this out.
There we go. Free shipping to the United States. All right, so that’s very cool. Let’s drill down a little bit more specific we could do. Well, I guess this isn’t more specific, but why don’t we try it by time zone.
All right, I’m in the central time zone, so I’m going to go ahead and leave that as the only targeted location. I’ll say something like what’s up central time zone. Not very practical, but this is just for testing. Let’s go ahead and visit the site. And there we go.
What’s up, central time zone? That worked really well as well. All right, now let’s get a little bit more specific. Let’s do it by state. Go ahead and remove my time zone.
Go to state and we’ll type in Minnesota. That is the state that I live in. We’ll say something like free shipping to Minnesota. All right, we’ll go ahead and update this. Once again, let’s check out the homepage.
Now this one isn’t working and that’s because geolocating is imprecise. When I went ahead and looked up my IP address, it was found inside of Minnesota, particularly Prior Lake, Minnesota, which is not actually the city I live in, but that’s what it says I’m in. So let’s go ahead and give it a whirl and see if Prior Lake shows up when I choose city. There it is. We’ll remove Minnesota and let’s hit update.
Now if this works it will be really interesting. No, this one doesn’t work either. So obviously the geolocating service that if So is using is not able to target my state correctly. Now I know just from browsing sites like BestBuy.com that they often think I’m in Illinois. So there’s got to be something with my IP address being mixed up for Illinois with whatever geolocating services people are using.
So I’m going to go ahead and try and see if it identifies me as in Illinois. Visit the site. It does. It thinks I’m in Illinois, not Minnesota. But you know what, I’m going to blame my ISP on this one.
Not necessarily if so, because like I said, other large sites mix this up all the time. All right, now I’m going to show you a really interesting way to use if So with Elementor Pro so that you’re not stuck using this tiny editor over here to do all of your adjustments. All right, so hang with me. Let’s head over to elementor Pro and let’s go ahead and create a new template. Let me go templates add new.
Then I’m going to choose section. We’ll give it a name and hit create template. The content doesn’t really matter here. You’d be able to build whatever you want in elementor. For now, I’m just going to go ahead and choose.
How about this FAQ and we’ll insert this into the page. No missing this. A big black section with bright green text. Let’s go ahead and save it and we’ll head back out to the dashboard. Now let’s go to our save templates.
What you’re going to find here is that template we just created, but there’s also a short code for it. I can copy this shortpixel, head back over to If So, open up my trigger and place that as my dynamic content. Let’s go ahead and update this. Now I’m going to move that shortcode to a more appropriate place. Hang with me.
This will look kind of ugly at first. There it’s displaying. Let’s go ahead and edit this. Let’s add a new section up top here. We’ll move over that shortcode.
I’m going to make this full width and let’s go ahead and update view the page and there we go. There is a completely personalized section showing up. Because I live in Illinois, if I were to access this from a different state or at least one that correctly identifies my IP address, this would not be showing up. So yes, this is a little tedious because now you’ve got to design all of your sections inside of elementor templates and then copy and paste the shortpixel over and If So but man, the possibilities are intense here. You could have entirely different hero sections depending on who is visiting your website.
Completely personalized with a unique design that is more appropriate to that type of visitor. The possibilities for conversion rate optimization are practically endless. So what’s the downside of using If So? Well, quite frankly, it’s that you can’t use the personalization on cached pages. It kind of makes sense, right?
Because cached pages are prerendered before the visitor gets there, so there’s no way to customize them. However, there is a workaround on the horizon. They’re going to do a little bit of trickery with some JavaScript so that this can eventually work even on cached pages. So for now, you just have to exclude the pages you have personalization on from your cache. Now you won’t have personalization on every single page.
So that’s really not that big of a deal in my mind. Overall, If So is a really usable personalization plugin, I think some of the limitations actually end up being benefits so that you don’t overdo this stuff because really a little bit goes a long way. I’m interested to see how the plugin progresses. There definitely have some fit and finish issues just to make it a little bit more beautiful and user friendly overall. I’m going to give this one a solid 8.7 out of ten.
If you want to grab your copy of If So, the link will be in the description. If you want to discuss the deal a little bit further, of course you can leave me a comment or head over to the Facebook group. We’re always welcoming new members over there. That’s going to do it for this video. Thank you for watching.
I hope you found it helpful and I’ll see you in the next review.
